In yesterday’s Gotham Gazette, Murphy Adjunct Professor Sam Stein, along with CUNY Professor Tarry Hum, wrote an op-ed about the “under the radar” re-zoning of an area some are calling “Flushing West” (Flushing’s Affordable Housing at Risk, 5/2/16).

According to Stein and Hum, this re-zoning threatens to destroy existing affordable housing by incentivizing real estate speculation. They write:

This proposed rezoning would have a transformative impact on Flushing, a densely populated, pan-Asian immigrant neighborhood with a sizable Latino population and a small but historic African-American community.[…]

Rent regulation accounts for nearly all of Flushing’s affordable housing. The neighborhood’s white-hot real estate market, however, increasingly threatens these rent-stabilized apartments.  DCP’s proposed rezoning – which links the production of affordable housing with the construction of thousands of luxury units – has only increased land speculation and, therefore, landlords’ imperative to deregulate their holdings. Though the rezoning has been paired with an increase in funding for anti-eviction legal services, it has already catalyzed a number of hyper-speculative real estate transactions in downtown Flushing, including within the rezoning area.

Meanwhile, the “affordable housing” that will be built as part of the plan will be meager and largely unaffordable to low-income residents: Continue reading Flushing Re-zoning: a Threat to Affordable Housing? →